Automated Road Crack Localization for Spatially Guided Highway Maintenance

Highway networks are crucial for economic prosperity. Climate change‐induced temperature fluctuations are exacerbating stress on road pavements, resulting in elevated maintenance costs. This underscores the need for precisely targeted maintenance strategies. This study investigates the potential of open‐source data to support geographically informed highway infrastructure maintenance. The proposed framework integrates airborne imagery and OpenStreetMap (OSM) to fine‐tune YOLOv11 for highway crack localization. To demonstrate the framework's real‐world applicability, a Swiss Relative Highway Crack Density (RHCD) index was constructed to inform maintenance prioritization across the national network. The crack classification model achieved an F1‐score of 0.84 $$ 0.84 $$ for the positive class (crack) and 0.97 $$ 0.97 $$ for the negative class (no crack). The Swiss RHCD index exhibited weak correlations with Long‐term Land Surface Temperature Amplitudes (LT‐LST‐A) (Pearson's r = − 0.05 $$ r=-0.05 $$ ) and Traffic Volume (TV) (Pearson's r $$ r $$ = 0.17), underscoring its added value as a more direct indicator of road condition. Significantly high RHCD values were observed near urban centers and intersections, providing contextual validation for the predictions. These findings highlight the value of open‐source data sharing to drive innovation, ultimately enabling more efficient solutions in the public sector.